YMMV / Kirby's Adventure

• Anti-Climax Boss: Nightmare's second phase can be ridiculously easy once you nail down his attack patterns, which are mostly predictable and easy to dodge.
• Awesome Art:
  • Being a late NES game, the game has the advantage to truly show off the NES' graphical capablities and the results are what is one of the most gorgeous games on the system, featuring very colorful, detailed and elaborate backgrounds (for its time anyway). The graphics are only made better via the 3D classics port, which adds some extra effects to them (like added gradients) to make them pop out that much more.
  • The GBA remake is simply put, gorgeous, with the backgrounds being colorful, lush, elaborate worlds that are filled to the brim with detailed Scenery Porn. It's little wonder that the next two games kept this aesthetic.
• Awesome Music: It's a Kirby game, what else can be said here?
• Awesome Video Game Levels:
  • 7-2 has Kirby climb a tower while facing almost every mini-boss in the game, and the remake sets it to the energetic tune of King Dedede's theme.
  • 7-6, the final main stage, is a wonderful throwback to Kirby's Dream Land, complete with the nostalgic theme of Green Greens.
• Even Better Sequel: Kirby's Dream Land was a fun game, but very short and rather vanilla in gameplay. This sequel considerably improved on it with more ambitious level design, some of the best graphics the NES could churn out, the series' iconic Power Copying, and was the debut of the fan-favourite Meta Knight.
• Franchise Original Sin: This game would set the trend of giving a shooter 11th-Hour Superpower to the player on the final boss that following games would follow. While following games like Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, Kirby: Squeak Squad, and Kirby: Triple Deluxe would incorporate their final hour abilities on the same gameplay lane as all the other bosses, later games like Kirby: Planet Robobot and Kirby Star Allies are occasionally criticized for their overreliance on shooter segments for the final boss. In particular, while this game's simplistic controls make it a smooth transition from the ordinary gameplay, the Unexpected Gameplay Change and limited options in later games make it less appealing to some players.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Spark and Freeze. They both create a force field around Kirby, allowing players to quickly shield themselves from danger when the situation calls for it. This is good, considering even the slightest scratch from an enemy makes Kirby lose his ability and he needs all the protection he can get. Try them against bosses as well. You may be shocked by the damage they can do. It was also cool of the level designers to have both of these abilities accessed relatively early on in the game.
  • The UFO ability gives Kirby the ability to fly and hover around incredibly quickly, provided there are no ladders in the stage. In addition, the UFO has 4 attacks, depending on how long each button is pressed. Pressing B is a copy of the Beam ability, holding B for a short time is a copy of the Laser ability, holding B for a medium amount of time shoots out a star identical to the one from spitting out an enemy, and holding B for a long amount of time increases the power and gives it the ability to go through walls. Its main drawback is that it only lasts for one stage, but can be circumvented with a glitch below. If you use that glitch, the game becomes trivial.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • For some Copy Abilities (namely Sword, Parasol, Hammer and UFO), it is possible to keep them forever by discarding the ability while pausing the game and exiting a stage. The game will treat Kirby as if he has no power, while he still has it. This means getting hit will not cause Kirby to lose the ability (discarding the ability or dying will, however, and reswallowing the star doesn't restore the ability), and one-round abilities can last until you die or you give it up). This means that UFO Kirby can be used in every stage and in the hub areas.
  • If you use your last charge on a Mike ability to deal the finishing blow to Paint Roller while on the spot where the Star Rod piece spawns, you collect the piece and the game skips the check on whether your power has run out or not. This allows you near-infinite uses of the Mike ability from then on, even if you get your power knocked out of you by getting hit. This is also possible on a stage with a switch or in the Kracko battle. This bug only exists in the NES version.
  • In the original Japanese NES and all 3DS versions, when Heavy Mole is defeated, Kirby's vitality is completely refilled on the next screen... even on the Boss Endurance, which comes in handy since the next boss is Meta Knight.
• Growing the Beard: This was the first Kirby game to introduce Copy Abilities and a save feature, and it introduced other iconic series hallmarks; like fan-favorite character Meta Knight, and King Dedede really being a good guy.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A preview of the game on Nintendo Power issue 47 back in 1993 had a headline that went Kirby's Adventure: Nightmare in Dream Land◊. Take a guess as to what the GBA remake ended up being called 9 years later.
  • One Japanese commercial for the game depicted Kirby and co in a yarn style, 17 years before the release of Kirby's Epic Yarn. The yarn designs in the commercial even look remarkably identical to the yarn designs in Epic Yarn.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Extra Game in the original game. Your hit points are reduced to three, and you can't save your game. The GBA remake changes it so you can save your game.
  • Meta Knightmare in Nightmare in Dream Land. Like with Extra Game, you start with two lives and get three hit points, but unlike the GBA remake's Extra Game, you can't save. Meta Knight moves faster and gets six sword-based attacks that can solve all puzzles, but he can't copy abilities and is much heavier than Kirby.
• Once Original, Now Common: The game wasn't just innovative for the overall Kirby franchise, but it also pushed the upper limits of the NES; it features many large and detailed sprites, great use of color, a catchy and varied soundtrack, lush animated backgrounds (including the famous rotating towers in Butter Building), and extra features such as save files and a Boss Rush mode. In fact, much of this was uncommon even on 16-bit systems of the time; nowadays, it can be easy to take all of this for granted and see Adventure as a typical NES game.
• Polished Port: The 3D Classics version on the 3DS is largely considered by most to be the definitive version of the original NES game, since it eliminates the lag and the slowdown present in the original NES game, fixes several glitches and polishes up the controls a bit. It also subtly enhances the original visuals, making them look even better than they did in the original, while still retaining their NES charm, as well as design elements and effects that were lost in the GBA remake (such as the rotating Butter Building towers).
• Remade and Improved: Although some of the changes made have been criticized by fans of the original (such as the removal of the rotating Butter Building towers), a substantial camp of fans consider the GBA remake, Nightmare in Dream Land, largely superior to the NES original. It boasts updated visuals and tighter controls, lacks the lag and slowdown featured in the original, new mini games and an entirely new mode in which you play through most of the campaign as Meta Knight. It even adds the Copy Ability hats from Kirby Super Star.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Every time Kirby falls from a large height, he'll tumble mid-fall and land on his face on the ground. Cute the first few times it happens, annoying if there's an enemy right after a large drop that is nigh-inevitably going to ram into you for daring to fall at the wrong time. One drop in 3-2 even seems to explicitly be built for you to either slow down, or end up tumbling and then bouncing off the ground into some low ceiling spikes. You can stop it by flying, but remembering to fly before every drop isn't exactly easy— especially since most of the later games of the series completely drop this quirk.
• That One Boss:
  • As far as mid-bosses go, Rolling Turtle (Phan Phan in the GBA remake) is the most likely to give players hell. He tends to move unpredictably, it takes considerably long periods of time for him to generate projectiles to inhale, and his grabbing attack seems to have a larger range of effect than his sprite.
  • Mr. Shine & Mr. Bright also qualify in the eyes of some players, since it can often be difficult to deal with the one on the ground and the one in the air at the same time, especially given the fact that defeating one doesn't stop them from actively participating in the rest of the fight. Whether or not they were made harder in the remake is up for debate, as their size is dramatically increased despite the smaller game resolution yet their attack patterns are considerably slower to compensate.
  • Heavy Mole is an autoscrolling boss that keeps destroying the earth in front of it, meaning that the player has to constantly adapt to the perpetually-changing environment while avoiding getting crushed by the scrolling walls or touching the bottom of the screen. Heavy Mole's missiles offer two copy abilities: Hammer, which brings the double-edged sword of tearing the dirt that forms the arena, and Sleep, which temporarily immobilizes Kirby and has a high risk of screwing the player over. There are cosmetic differences between the two types of missiles, but they're somewhat subtle and hard to notice during the rush to defeat the boss.
  • Meta Knight may very well be the hardest boss in the game — for starters, the Sword ability is forced onto the player, preventing any alternatives from being used (and unlike Kirby Super Star, picking up the Sword is required to even start the fight). Secondly, Meta Knight moves very erratically, making contact damage almost guaranteed. Finally, he is invincible unless attacked at specific times — namely, while in the air or from behind — and even if you do get behind him, he'll quickly turn around and more often than not hit you back. The difficulty was dramatically decreased in the GBA remake, where simple Button Mashing will nearly always win the fight due to Meta Knight's slower reflexes and the range of the sword.
  • King Dedede becomes this in the GBA remake. While he's a bit quicker in the NES version, he's bigger here despite the screen's smaller resolution — so both he and his attacks (especially his inhale) become much harder to avoid — and his characteristic "flinching-when-hit" does not stop his attacks or momentum when he jumps. With that, you can very well end up hitting him, only for him to fall on you or stomp you with his Hammer to cause damage like nothing happened. Oh, and most of the Copy Abilities do minimal damage to him as well, so having most of them — barring a few exceptions, those being rare and/or hard-to-get abilities such as Backdrop, Throw and Hammer — will just make the fight even more difficult. ^note On the bright side though, you do get some awesome music when you fight him in the GBA remake; a rendition of the "Fountain of Dreams" theme from Super Smash Bros. Melee, compared to the NES version's use of the standard boss theme as opposed to a unique composition or the Mt. Dedede theme. Early-Installment Weirdness may play into this a bit, as at the time it was simply a theme for the Kirby's Dream Land stage rather than being a distinct motif for King Dedede; kind of like how the castle theme in Super Mario Bros. never actually became a recurring motif for Bowser.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Stage 5-6’s switch is hidden at the very end and requires Hammer to break the blocks obstructing it. Problem is, it’s quite a long stage and Hammer can’t be found there, so you have to acquire it somewhere else and get through to the switch’s hiding spot without losing it. Possible case of Guide Dang It! in the original, where the blocks look like the surrounding terrain (albeit colored differently) and don’t indicate which ability breaks through, the remake changes them to generic metal blocks to be more obvious.
  • Stage 7-1 has a very cumbersome puzzle where you need to run back and forth through a room picking up different abilities to break the corresponding blocks. Very painful in the NES original, where every block in the room is the same and it’s not even indicated which are breakable, let alone which ability works on them. The remake again eases the procedure by turning the blocks broken with Burning into metal blocks.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Nightmare in Dream Land is markedly easier than Kirby's Adventure like many other GBA remakes, but comes with a few more baffling changes:
  • The original game has otherwise-pointless floating platforms connected to background elements like hills to add extra atmosphere. The remake apparently missed the point of of this level design and removed the background elements, resulting in floating platforms that are now just flat-out pointless.
  • Some fans aren’t fond of the new art direction for portraying the environments very differently to their original incarnations. Most notably, Butter Building on the NES was a grand, stately tower; but in the remake, it’s a decrepit and half-ruined one.
  • The rotating tower segments from Butter Building have been removed in favor of standard level design. The loss of Visual Effects of Awesome aside, it makes the Wheel Ability far less useful here.
  • The remake is also inexplicably missing the iconic "First you draw a circle..." opening from the original, replacing it with 128 Kirbys running on-screen at once.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Nightmare, who doesn't even get a mention, let alone an appearance, until right at the end.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The rotating parallax towers in Butter Building. Running around them even affects nearby enemies. Many people felt disappointed when this set-piece was dropped in the GBA remake in favor of a less impressive mist effect.

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